LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (12 page)

Eventually she ran out of things to pretend to do and peered over at me. “What you want?”

“I have a question about one of the companies registered with you: the Asian Bank of Commerce.”

The girl looked puzzled, as if the request was a novel one. Then she made an odd noise. “Whaaaa…”

“I just need some general information about the company,” I went on quickly, hoping for the best. “Who its directors are, where it’s organized, that short of thing.”

“No information,” the girl snapped. She looked down and pulled another stack of files toward her.

“For Christ’s sake,” I muttered as I stood up and took a step toward her desk, “all I want to know is what’s in the public filings. The company is licensed as a bank in Hong Kong and the registration information is public. I’m not asking you for the damned books.”

The girl spun around in her swivel chair so hard that I thought she was about to corkscrew herself right through the floor. Reaching into a cabinet behind her, she flipped through several piles of paper and then extracted a single sheet. She spun back around and wordlessly thrust it out toward me.

I took the sheet and started to return to my chair to read it, but I needn’t have bothered. There was nothing on it except the name Asian Bank of Commerce, the address of the building where I was, and one other sentence: “Contact Mr. Wang at Hong Kong Directors during business hours.”

I turned back to the girl, laid the sheet back on her desk, and tried my hard stare again.

“I would like to know who the directors are.”

“No information,” she repeated without looking up.

“Is Mr. Wang here?”

“Not here.”

“When will he be in?”

“Not here.”

I took a business card out of my wallet and laid it on the desk in front of the girl.

“When Mr. Wang comes in, would you please—”

The girl ignored my card. Instead, she jerked up the telephone receiver, stabbed at a button, and began to bark something into the receiver in rapid-fire Cantonese, rotating her chair until her back was to me.

I’d had enough. I left.

I stood out in the corridor for a moment wondering if I should have tried to push the girl a little rather than give up so easily. Maybe I could at least have found a way to irritate her enough to force Mr. Wang to make an appearance. My eyes wandered over the rows of wooden signs hanging on the wall while I considered the possibilities, but then I noticed something that suddenly caused me to forget all about the dimple with ears.

Down near the bottom of the second column of signs, stuck among the generic names that sounded exactly like the empty corporate shells they were, was a company name I recognized immediately: Cambodian Prawn Ventures Limited. That was the company vehicle Southeast Asian Investments was using for the shrimp farm investment we had just been discussing at the board meeting, the very company whose financial structure I had just been hired to review.

That was quite a coincidence, I reflected.

The same Hong Kong corporate services office that SAI was using to administer their company engaged in Cambodia shrimp farming was also administering the Hong Kong operations of the Asian Bank of Commerce, whatever they actually were. No doubt several hundred other investment companies used Hong Kong Directors to manage corporate vehicles for them as well, but that was still quite a coincidence.

“Ah, screw it,” I murmured, burying the bones of the conspiracy theories that were rattling faintly in the back of my mind. It really was just a coincidence, I told myself. It had to be.

When I got back to the Mandarin Hotel, I stopped at the cigar shop in the lobby and bought a couple boxes of Montecristos. I didn’t really feel like going up to my room, so I went into the Captain’s Bar and ordered an espresso. Since it was still early in the afternoon, I had the place more or less to myself and I cracked one of the boxes and took out a cigar. The waiter noticed what I was doing and brought me a cutter and some matches when he served my espresso.

I began the ritual of cutting and lighting my cigar, but my mind was on Barry Gale and the ABC. Until Sunday night I’d barely even heard of the Asian Bank of Commerce, but suddenly I seemed to be stumbling over all kinds of connections with it. What the hell was really going on here?

My personal policy for dealing with perplexing questions was pretty simple. I had long ago learned that there was always somebody somewhere who already knew whatever it was I needed to know, and if I asked them nicely, well… sometimes they would just tell me. The problem, of course, was how to find whoever it was who already knew what I needed to know.

I smoked the Montecristo and tapped my forefinger against my espresso cup.

In this case, fortunately, that problem was easy enough for me to solve. I knew a guy and this guy would know all about the Asian Bank of Commerce, especially the part that no one else wanted to talk about.

I lifted the cup and downed the espresso in three quick sips. It was rich and strong and I savored the jolt as the caffeine hit me.

Even better, the guy was right here in Hong Kong.

The question wasn’t how much this guy knew, it was whether he would tell
me
what he knew. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of any way to find out but to ask him.

I WENT UP
to my room and stashed the cigars I had bought, then pulled out my cell phone and checked the address book. Sure enough he was there. I hadn’t talked to Archie Ward in a long time, but it had been even longer since I’d cleaned out my address book.

I dialed his direct line at the main office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The woman who answered told me that Archie Ward no longer worked there, but of course that had been more or less what I’d expected her to say. Brushing aside the woman’s categorical insistence that she couldn’t help me, I gave her my name and told her that I was at the Mandarin.

Archie Ward was a redheaded, pathologically profane Aussie I had met a couple of years before. He told me then that he was a technology security specialist for HSBC and he had hired me to review a series of transactions that the bank thought had an unusually ripe odor to them. Large amounts of money had been moving back and forth between the bank’s main office in Hong Kong and some of its branches in Europe and Asia, and the coordinated way the transfers had been occurring had caused Archie to suspect that the bank was unwittingly facilitating some pretty questionable transactions.

Archie told me he had tracked all of the transfers among HSBC’s offices easily enough, but was having trouble understanding the movements of the funds once they had left the bank’s own system. He said that was why he needed my help, but of course it wasn’t. What he really wanted to know was exactly
who
was behind the transactions since he hadn’t been able to find out on his own. I understood that, and he knew I understood that.

Archie never said exactly who had referred him to me, but he used the name of a Washington lawyer I had known for a long time. When I called the fellow he gave Archie the sort of vague endorsement that was the traditional indication of an official sanction of some kind, although the lawyer was unwilling to be more specific. The whole assignment had felt a little screwy, but I liked Archie, and I had no real doubt that he was one of the good guys, so I had given him a hand without asking too many questions.

It hadn’t taken me long to figure out the corporate structure HSBC’s customer had been using to conceal the source of the funds. It was clever, but not that clever, and within a couple of weeks I knew that the instructions for the transfers had really been coming from a Greek-born arms dealer who now operated out of a ritzy beach resort about an hour north of Sydney. Somehow I got the impression Archie already knew that. He just hadn’t been able to prove it until I did it for him.

Naturally the connection between the source of the transfers I had uncovered and my friend Archie’s colorful Aussie accent struck me as something less than pure coincidence. By that time it was pretty obvious to me that Archie wasn’t actually employed by HSBC at all. To tell the truth, I had no doubt at all that Archie really worked for ASIS, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, but following accepted etiquette in such matters I pretended not to know. And for his part, Archie pretended not to know that I knew.

Archie had called me a few times after that with some general questions about corporate finance which happily I had been able to answer for him. He always ended our conversations by saying that he owed me one. This seemed to me as good a time as any to collect on the accumulated debt.

I had a couple of other Hong Kong numbers in my diary for Archie, too, so I called those for good measure. One was a mobile that didn’t even ring and had apparently been abandoned, but at the other number a woman’s voice answered with a simple, “Yes?” I smiled at her Australian accent, obvious even from that single word, and told her I was calling for Archie. Before she could protest her ignorance that any such person existed, I gave her my name, said I was at the Mandarin, and asked for Archie to call me there. Naturally, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about. I thanked her and hung up.

One of the numbers must have worked, maybe all of them, because about twenty minutes later the telephone in my room rang.

“You got your cell phone with you?” Archie spoke without preamble.

“I do.”

Before I even had a chance to give him the number he hung up. It was only a few seconds before it rang.

“Hello.”

“Good on ya, mate. She’ll be right now.“

“I won’t even bother to ask you how you got this number, Archie.”

“Shit, mate. I wouldn’t fucking tell you anyway.”

“So…” I hesitated a moment. “What’s new?”

Archie started laughing so hard I thought he might hurt himself.

“What’s new?
Jack Shepherd, you are without a doubt the only bloke I’ve ever known who would have the nerve to ring me up and ask, ‘What’s new?’ You Yank ratbags are too much. You really are.”

“Just being friendly.”

“Well, mate, I’m as busy as a one-legged bloke in an arse-kicking contest, so let’s have it. What’s on your mind?”

“It’s all probably just a lot of nothing, Archie, but I need to collect on one of those favors you owe me. Something a little strange has come up and I thought you might be able to give me some background.”

“Reckon I probably can if I want to. What’s the subject?”

“The Asian Bank of Commerce. You ever heard of it?”

There was a short silence.

“Bloody oath,” Archie sighed after a few moments. “What are you doing mixed up with those bodgie mongrels?”

“Well, it’s a little hard to explain, but—”

“Never mind. Can you meet me right now?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Sure. Where are you?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just pay attention, Jacko. Do exactly what I tell you to do.”

I paid attention, then following Archie’s instructions I took the lift downstairs and left the Mandarin by the front entrance. Climbing a short flight of stairs just on the other side of the hotel’s service drive, I joined the rivers of pedestrians flowing through the networks of overhead walkways that knitted Hong Kong together and walked to the Star Ferry terminal.

The Star Ferry had been running back and forth across Victoria Harbour for over a century. The little green-and-white double-decked vessels crossed the harbor from the wharf on Hong Kong Island, docked at Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula and then traveled back again, moving almost continuously over the same ten-minute route all day and through a good part of the night.

When each ferry bumped with practiced ease into its berth, a Chinese sailor in a blue uniform swung open an iron gate to allow boarding passengers to stream on even as disembarking passengers were still being funneled off in the opposite direction. After the ferry was filled—and it happened very quickly, like everything else in Hong Kong—a loud bell rang, a large traffic signal hanging over the gate snapped first to yellow and then to red, and a sailor-suited man pushed the iron gate firmly shut, stemming if only for a moment the relentlessly advancing crowds. Of course, there were always a last few stubborn stragglers determined to slip around the gate’s closing edge and leap across to the deck of the ferry as the gangway was being hauled away, all that in spite of the fact that another green-and-white ferry would be slipping into the wharf almost as soon as the first one was clear and the whole process would begin again after only the slightest interruption. This was Hong Kong after all. Wasted time was wasted money.

At a few minutes after five I was standing in front of the Star Ferry terminal waiting for Archie. I glanced at my watch and contemplated my immediate future. The traffic to the airport would be horrible. If I was going to make my flight to Bangkok, I probably had a half-hour at the very most to talk to Archie, get back to the hotel, grab my bag, and check out.

That looked pretty unlikely right then, and I knew that this unscheduled excursion would almost certainly cause me to be stuck in Hong Kong for another night. Anita was going to be less than thrilled about that. Actually, I was less than thrilled about that, too. Things had been a little strained with Anita ever since my Sunday night rendezvous with Barry Gale so I was eager to get home. And yet, here I was standing in front of the Star Ferry waiting for Archie Ward. I began to polish the story I would be telling Anita a little later on the telephone.

The walkways of the ferry building were jammed with commuters on their way to Kowloon and the crowds shouldered past me as I shifted my weight from foot to foot. Finally I saw Archie coming from the direction of the Post Office building. He was easing through the throng in such a practiced way that there was hardly a ripple around him and for a moment I envied the evident deftness he had developed for living in a city as combative as Hong Kong.

Archie grinned as he eased up next to me and gave my shoulder a warm squeeze.

“G’day, mate. How you keeping?”